An inland lake north of Muskegon is expected to reach a major milestone this year. Officials anticipate White Lake will be removed from a list of the most-polluted places surrounding the Great Lakes this year.

The Occidental (Hooker) Chemical Company property was the primary source of contamination. Discharges from the site resulted in White Lake becoming polluted with chloroform, tetrachloride, and various volatile organic and chemical compounds. High levels of PCBs and chromium were also found. Agricultural runoff contributed to up to 97% of the phosphorus pollution in White Lake.

Jon Allan is director of Michigan’s Office of the Great Lakes. He says White Lake is one of 14 in the state included on the Areas of Concern list. Efforts to clean them up have been underway for almost 30 years.

“Most of the legacy of contamination in many of these places ends up in our rivers, our harbors, the river mouths and in sediments. Removing contamination from sediments is some of the hardest stuff and the most expensive stuff that we have to do,” Allan said.

Only two AOC sites have been delisted in the U.S. and only three in Canada.

“White Lake is fortunate and is kind of coming up first on the list. Some contamination in some other sites just remains a little more stubborn or complicated or expensive. But we’re seeing progress in all of our communities,” Allan said.

He says money from the federal Great Lakes Restoration program has played a big part in cleaning up these sites recently.

Jeff Auch, executive director of the Muskegon Conservation District, says the $2.1 million White Lake got from the program three years ago was a big help.

He says the public advisory committee for the site has been active in raising awareness of the work that needed to be done. He says they also were good about having studies completed about what remedial work needed to be done so that when grant money was available, they were already prepared to apply for it.

“We still have (pollution) issues,” Auch said. “But coming off the list means the industrial past has been officially mitigated.”

The official designation may take until the end of the year. It needs approval from the state, then the U.S. EPA and then at the international level.

But Auch says they’re likely to throw a celebration this summer. “Considering it’s been a 20-year process, I think it’s well worth it to celebrate,” he said.

All this week we're bringing you a special series on cancer and the environment.

Cancer is a scary enough word, and cancer cluster can sound even scarier. That term describes a place where more people have cancer than you’d expect to find in the rest of the population. But finding out if a cluster really exists and then getting something done about it is hard, really hard.

Claire Schlaff doesn’t know if there’s a cancer cluster in her small resort community around White Lake, Michigan on the western side of the state. She says she just wanted to know more about what might have caused her son, Doug to get cancer and die three years ago.

“He went to two major medical facilities and was even in a clinical trial. They were focused on treatment. They weren’t about doing research into what causes Ewing’s Sarcoma.”

Claire’s daughter-in-law Polly was also looking for answers to what had caused the disease. She’s Doug’s widow and the mother of his three boys.

“He was diagnosed when he was 33 and he passed away when he was 35. We were high school sweethearts. He was a high school counselor; he was a high school basketball coach. He was an athlete.”

An inland lake in west Michigan is getting a boost from the federal government to help clean up pollution and restore wildlife habitats.

It’s one of many places along the Great Lakes shoreline where cleanups are needed.

Programs to clean up White Lake, north of Muskegon, have been awarded more than $2 million for restoration. The money will be used to help clean toxins and reestablish habitat for fish and wildlife.

Patty Birkholz, director of the Office of the Great Lakes says damage done by years of pollution from the manufacturing industry is not beyond repair.

“That’s true, it’s not. But it’s taken a huge investment on the part of the federal government, on the part of the state government, but also a lot of work by the local people.”

Birkholz says Michigan has more “Areas of Concern” near the Great Lakes than any of the other Great Lakes states. She says it’s important for the state to rehabilitate waterways that were damaged by the, quote, ‘sins of our fathers.’

Residents of White Lake gathered this morning to dispute their inclusion on a list of cancer clusters in Michigan. The list was compiled by the National Disease Cluster Coalition.

Claire Schlaff started the White Lake Cancer Mapping Project after her son passed away from a rare cancer. She says the National Disease Cluster Coalition misinterpreted information from the White Lake Cancer Mapping project:

“The materials they put out kind of made it look like all of these were confirmed clusters, including ours, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Although we’re looking into it, nothing has been confirmed.”

Schlaff said the White Lake Mapping Project data will not be ready for analysis for at least a year. She says the project was meant to find a link between cancer and the environment:

“I’m not looking for a yes or no answer about whether there’s a cancer cluster here. What I am trying to do and what our group is trying to do is to learn more about the connection between the environment and cancers.”

White Lake was put on a list of toxic hotspots in the mid-1980s because of pollution from the Occidental Chemical Company.

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- A coalition of 59 groups from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a broad review of the cumulative effects of expanded mining in the Lake Superior basin.

They've written to the EPA's regional administrator in Chicago, Susan Hedman, to ask the federal agency to study the long-term effects of mining activities, including copper mines proposed or planned for northeastern Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, as well as a proposed iron mine in northern Wisconsin.

The Allied site is where a paper mill dumped waste for decades. The pile is laced with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). They can cause cancer and other health effects, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

A new report says a permanent solution to the Asian carp threat to the Great Lakes could take years to build and cost billions of dollars.

The report says it’s very possible for the invasive species to slip from the Mississippi River system into the Great Lakes. And that it’s possible for the species to live in the lakes and grow in population.

The report was prepared by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for Congress.

He also spoke about how, unlike the other four Great Lakes, Lake Erie is surrounded by agriculture and a more urbanized landscape.

You can listen to him speak about his "50 and 2 Rule" here:

Lake Erie has seen a resurgence in blooms of cyanobacteria (sometimes referred to as blue-green algae) over the last ten years. It was once a big problem in the 60s and 70s, and it has returned as a problem again.